There were roses, as always, in a thin-stemmed vase on the breakfast table. As always, he sniffed them in appreciation before sitting down, and waited for his mother to say, “Aren’t they lovely this morning?”
After he said yes, they were lovely, she began her discussion of who was out of town, and who wasn’t, and of the Christmas receptions and parties.
He started after the decapitation of the breakfast eggs. “Henrietta,” he said, “I’m taking off until after the holidays. What say we drive up to Front Royal for Christmas?”
She looked at him in disbelief. “Did you say Front Royal—now—in December?”
“It’ll be lovely in the mountains. There’ll be snow, perhaps. We’ll have a white Christmas, just us two.”
“Raoul, you must have lost your mind. Front Royal is absolutely frigid in December. There’s no heat in the lodge except the open fireplaces. The place isn’t ready for us. We’d have to take blankets and goodness knows what else. Besides, I’m going to a very important luncheon Friday—the wife of the British ambassador will be there—and next week my calendar is full. So is yours, if I remember. And I have to start planning for our January dinner. We’ll have to hold the guest list to twenty-two unless you’d prefer to have it buffet. I think buffets have become gauche. They’re so easy to have. Anybody can have a buffet. Anyway, you’d better let me know soon whom you want to invite.”
Raoul saw that indirection was impossible. Shock treatment was required. “What would you say,” he asked, “if I told you that an H-bomb was going to drop on Washington Monday morning?”
Henrietta applied butter and marmalade to a thin sliver of toast. “Why, I’d say ridiculous. I was talking to Genevieve Snavely only yesterday afternoon at the Comptons’ bridge. She’s the wife of the Senator from Mississippi, you know, and she and the senator were gone all summer and most of the fall on a trip around the world. The senator is on some sort of committee. You should see the lovely silk brocades and shantung gowns she brought back from Hong Kong. Got them for nothing, really absolutely nothing. Anyway, Genevieve told me that nobody speaks of war any more. Not only that, but she met a Russian refugee in Tokyo who told her that he didn’t believe the Russians had an H-bomb at all. Just a lot of bluff. She said she had the most wonderful time everywhere and that some of the hotels in Turkey and Lebanon and places like that were as modern as the Statler, and that almost everyone she met spoke English. Imagine.”
Raoul smiled. No use trying to shock Henrietta, because Henrietta’s mind was equipped with a built-in censor to block unpleasant realities, just as Gus, the chauffeur-butler, shooed peddlers from the door. Henrietta heard and read only what she wanted to hear and read, and therefore she was as serene and happy as any woman in Washington. He would have to try something else. “To tell you the truth, Henrietta,” he said, “I was hoping to take Katy Hume to Front Royal with us.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Walback. “So that’s how it is. I should have guessed. Well, of course you’ll need a chaperone. I’ll be delighted. Such a lovely girl. So healthy-looking. And, really, from quite good family, isn’t she?”
“Her father was a very distinguished scholar,” Raoul said.
“Do you know anything about her mother?”
“Nothing, except that she had one.”
“I believe she said her mother was from Virginia. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”
“Infallible. This morning I’ll drop by the bank, and then I’ll call on her.”
“I think that’s very nice. When do you want to leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Tomorrow morning! I couldn’t possibly be ready by tomorrow morning! Why, I’ll have to send regrets to half a dozen people.”
Raoul realized that Henrietta could be rushed only so fast. “Well, we’ll make it Friday. There’s a lot of shopping I have to do, and that I can do better in Washington than in Virginia. We’ll have to take both cars because we’re going to have quite a load. Gus can drive yours.”
Henrietta said nothing, although this sounded like a very considerable expedition. When she thought it over, she was certain that Raoul planned to marry the Hume girl quietly in Front Royal, and, blessed boy, wanted his mother to be there. It would be a very proper elopement and would cause quite a stir in her set. She would pretend surprise, and not buy presents until she made up her mind as to what Katharine needed. 4
That morning Katharine had phone calls from Colonel Cragey, Felix Fromburg, and Simmons. She realized, with some pride, that they automatically and without any spoken agreement regarded her as the clearinghouse for their information. Simmons was senior, but the group’s vigor centered in her. At noon Raoul arrived carrying a pigskin dispatch case. “Going somewhere?” she asked.
“Depends,” he said. He dropped the bag on her desk, sat down in her swivel chair, and swung around to face her. “Hear anything?” he asked.
“Yes. Nothing good. Nothing even hopeful, except from Steve Batt. Navy won’t interfere in Clumb’s action, but Navy will send a hunter-killer group into the North Atlantic if and when the ships can be detached from present duty. They’re helping the Air Force look for B-Ninety-Nine survivors.”
“What about Cragey?”
“Poor fellow. He bumped into the wrong General in G-2. The General was a classmate of Clumb’s at The Point. Cragey’s on the way home to Charlottesville, more or less in disgrace.”
“He could be worse off,” said Raoul. “And Simmons?”
Katharine detected an unusual tenseness in Raoul. She wondered about the reason. She lighted a cigarette and stretched her legs out on the couch before she replied. “Simmons said that most of the people in authority at State are out of the city. Simmons got the brush from one who wasn’t. Now he’s writing memos. He doesn’t believe he can get any action, because it’s hard to get action in State without meetings and conferences, and with Christmas coming next week it’s difficult to get people together.”
“And Fromburg?”
“He’s beside himself. Waited all afternoon to see the FBI’s counter-espionage chief. Finally he talked to an assistant who just happened to be looking around for more people to do field security checks. Welcomed Felix with open arms and tried to put him to routine snoopin’. Felix refused. Says he’ll wait in his chief’s outer office until eternity if he has to. That’s exactly how long he may have to wait.”
“I had somewhat the same experience in CIA,” Raoul said. “We’re not getting anywhere and we’re not going to get anywhere. Not in time. The people of this country are going to catch hell, Katy, and they deserve it. They’re selfish, and stupid, and blind. We’re in the fumbling hands of the bourgeois. The solid middle class is up on the pedestal. It’s solid—all right—through the ears.”
Katharine had never heard Raoul speak this way before. As a matter of fact, she had never heard him express any clear-cut social or political opinions. His use of the word bourgeois angered her. It was a propaganda word. British and French aristocrats had found it useful, in the nineteenth century, in expressing contempt for Americans. The Communists had adopted it for the same purpose in the twentieth. She took off her glasses, like a small boy who has been called a fighting word. “I’ve never thought about it much,” she said, “but I guess I’m middle class and I suppose that makes me bourgeois.”
“Quite the contrary,” Raoul said.
“Don’t think this country is selfish or stupid, because it isn’t. Complacent we may be, and overly optimistic, and even blind. The people of this country haven’t been conditioned to its desolation. There has been no fighting on this soil for a hundred years. Total catastrophe is outside their experience and beyond their imagination. Except for the few of us whose job it is to think of nothing else. A Frenchman or a German or an Englishman whose guts have been wrenched apart—or his family wiped out—by a one-ton bomb has some idea of what thirty million tons of TNT might be like. Not much, but some. He doesn’t understand radiation, perhaps, but he understands the thermal effect, and blast. And there are survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who understand all of it. We understand none, except for a handful of us—those few million veterans who actually have heard and seen and felt and smelled war. So for most of us the danger is theoretical, not real. You can tell a child, over and over, that a rattlesnake is dangerous. But if the child has never seen any kind of snake, doesn’t know what one looks like, he may try to pet a rattler. Perhaps that is stupidity.”